Quotes by Julian Barnes

About Julian Barnes:

Julian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending (2011), and three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. ...

Julian Barnes

Istorija yra nugalėtojų melas, tik reikia pridurti, jog tai ir nugalėtųjų saviapgaulė.

Julian Barnes

The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide‟s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the Page | 49 . state whic...

Julian Barnes

Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, tha...

Julian Barnes

Be to, tas skausmas truko neilgai. Kaip minėjau, turiu stiprų savisaugos instinktą. Man pavyko išstumti Veroniką iš širdies ir iš gyvenimo

Julian Barnes

This [...] isn`t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn`t always the same as what you witnessed.

Julian Barnes

What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

Julian Barnes

Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.

Julian Barnes

...I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

Julian Barnes

I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long s...

Julian Barnes

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

Julian Barnes

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act ...

Julian Barnes

One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status.

Julian Barnes

You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.

Julian Barnes

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

Julian Barnes

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, m...

Julian Barnes

In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning (for suicide): that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it ...

Julian Barnes

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

Julian Barnes

I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gestur...

Julian Barnes

Margarita mėgdavo sakyti, kad yra dvi rūšys moterų: tos, kurios matomos kiaurai, ir tos, kurios nešioja paslaptį. Ir kad tai yra svarbiausia, ką vyrai išsyk pajunta, ir svarbiausia, kas juos patraukia arba ne. Vienus traukia vieno tipo motery...

Julian Barnes

After a long analysis of Robson’s suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided it was his ethical duty to...

Julian Barnes

Author Bio

  • NameJulian Barnes
  • DescriptionEnglish writer
  • AliasesBarnes, Julian; J. Barnes; J Barnes
  • BornJanuary 19, 1946
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Translator; Novelist; Essayist
  • WorksThe Sense Of An Ending
  • AwardsAustrian State Prize For European Literature; Man Booker Prize; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize